


Avenge

by hitlikehammers



Category: The Avengers (2012), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Epic Bromance, Gen, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-10
Updated: 2013-03-10
Packaged: 2017-12-04 22:02:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/715582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/pseuds/hitlikehammers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loki has committed atrocities, yes, but he is still Thor's brother. There is a difference between vengeance and cruelty.</p><p>And <i>no one</i> should have to live in cage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Avenge

**Author's Note:**

  * For [speakmefair](https://archiveofourown.org/users/speakmefair/gifts).



> For my darling [speakmefair](http://archiveofourown.org/users/speakmefair), as a token of all the hugs and a reminder that my solid right-hook is always at your disposal <3

It takes only a sniff at the tall glass to know what it is. At another time, perhaps, Thor would have smiled, for the nostalgia of it. 

Not now.

“Heard you were a fan,” Tony tells him as he deposits the boilermaker in front of Thor’s folded hands, taking a drink from his whiskey as he makes for a chair of his own. “Just don’t throw it when you’re done.”

Thor reaches for the glass and makes to finish it swiftly. 

“You saw him,” Tony observes, correctly. Thor stops cold, rights the glass, replaces it.

Searches for words that do not come readily, that do not come at all.

“He is,” Thor tries, and knows that he will fail regardless of what follows: “brought _low_.”

“Look,” Tony rests his elbows on the table between them, leans in as he empties his glass in a swallow. “I don’t have a brother, I don’t know what that means.”

“He told me,” Thor begins, the heaviness on his heart shifting, bearing deep as he makes to swallow: the effort profound. 

“If ever there was a shadow he grew in, it was not for his lack of light,” and no, never for the lack of his brother’s light, that bright child, that curious mind, the slow smile that gleamed and trusted beyond its stretch; “but for my own fear.” 

Thor lets his fingers drag in the frost upon his glass; shivers, and thinks nothing of Jotunheim. 

“I needed him safe, always.” His grip cracks the glass, and he can feel the fury of his pulse confused, conflicted as it rises, rage and love and more pain than he knows to bear beyond his body, beyond some healing he can seek.

Tony fills his own glass again, and slides it across the table with a nod. Thor grimaces, the most grateful gesture he thinks he can stand. 

“We are made to be bound to our calling,” Thor grinds out as he imbibes liquid fire from the proffered glass: Surtr’s brew. “Without the lightning,” he confesses, “I am lost.”

He finds his limbs flooding unexpectedly with relief when understanding sparks in the human’s eyes.

“And Loki,” Tony starts, his voice low—not clever, but almost sad; “he’s—”

“The trickster.” Both Thor and Tony turn toward the doorway where Bruce stands, having heard too much. “His voice, that’s his,” Bruce toys with his glasses; “that’s his ‘calling’, right?”

Tony looks to Thor for confirmation of the inevitable; Thor nods, weighted by the woe of his brother’s fate, the unthinkable torment of his circumstance.

“They’ve taken more than his freedom,” Thor tells them solemnly; “they’ve arrested his soul.”

There is silence, and Thor bears its weight as mourning; rightly so.

“What he has become is deplorable, shameful in light of both his birth and his rearing,” Thor continues, his voice tight with the tearing, the rift that yawns wide within him and pulls between what he knows before him and what he feels within. 

“Yet he is not hollow in his heart,” and this Thor believes, he must believe because to live in the heart of another is to give a pieces of one’s own to be held, and Thor has held his brother firm within his heart from their earliest days; he cannot think it to have been folly, all this time. “He is wronged, and so he wrongs in kind.”

Thor can’t look to gauge the reactions of his companions, too raw is the image of his brother’s body, bowed; his brother’s gifts, deadened; his lips nailed shut by that contraption, by people who know not what they do.

“To see him as he is,” Thor begins, shakes his head; “to see him this way, now...”

“I know what it’s like to be kept in the dark,” Tony says simply, but his eyes are dark with a haunting Thor has not yet witnessed in him so baldly, so fierce. “I’m not sure anyone deserves that.”

“No one should live in cage,” Bruce agrees, draws nearer, and Thor finds unanticipated comfort in this, in them: in affirmations of being that transcend space and time and mortality itself. “It’s better to die than stay cornered.”

Thor finds comfort in it, yes; but he needs to be certain. “What are you saying?” 

“We’re asking,” Tony begins, his tone deliberate; “if you can be sure that he will get real justice, and not just blind punishment.”

“There’s a difference,” Bruce nods to himself, tucks his glasses in his shirt pocket before looking up, his eyes hard inside that kind face he keeps despite its coloration; “between vengeance and cruelty.”

Tony slips his phone from his jeans and glances up as he taps upon the screen. “If you can show him that?” It’s an offering, a compromise, camaraderie: a promise. 

“But how?” Thor has learned wariness in unexpected aid; and yet, he has learned to trust these few, learned to see in them potential beyond their own ken.  

“Seriously?” Tony quirks an eyebrow and flips the screen toward Thor to display the open interface: the S.H.I.E.L.D. cell grid. “You think these security protocols have anything on me?”

Thor allows his mouth the leave to smile, then.


End file.
